Beneath the quiet headstones of East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca, New York, roughly 5.5 million ground-nesting bees have built a hidden city in the soil. That is the estimate from a peer-reviewed study published in Apidologie in April 2026, based on fieldwork by Cornell University researchers who tracked the insects emerging from the earth during spring 2023. The finding makes East Lawn home to one of the largest and oldest known aggregations of solitary ground-nesting bees on the planet, and it raises a question cities rarely consider: how much invisible wildlife thrives in the urban green spaces we never think to protect?
Millions of bees, hiding in plain sight
The species in question, Andrena regularis, does not build hives or produce honey. Each female digs her own tunnel system in bare or sparsely vegetated soil, stocks brood cells with pollen and nectar, and seals them shut. The result, when thousands of females nest in close proximity, is a dense underground aggregation that can span large areas while remaining almost invisible at the surface.
To measure the population at East Lawn, the research team led by Hoge et al. deployed 10 soil emergence traps across the cemetery grounds between March 30 and May 16, 2023. Each trap covered 0.36 square meters. From the captured bees, the researchers calculated a mean density of approximately 853 Andrena regularis per square meter, then scaled that figure across the cemetery’s total area to reach the 5.5 million estimate.
That number comes with an important caveat. The extrapolation assumes bee nests are distributed relatively evenly across the grounds. If density varies sharply with soil type, slope, or vegetation, some zones could be far more crowded than others, and the true total could be higher or lower. The study documents its methods in detail, but without access to full supplementary data tables, outside researchers cannot yet verify how much density varied between trap locations.
A 90-year presence
East Lawn is not a new home for these bees. Specimen records in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), a database that aggregates curated museum and field collections worldwide, document Andrena regularis at the cemetery as far back as 1935. The Hoge et al. study cited this dataset to establish the aggregation’s longevity.
A presence stretching roughly nine decades at a single site is unusual for any wild bee population. Cornell’s newsroom described the aggregation as one of the largest and oldest on record, though no ranked global database of solitary bee aggregations exists for independent comparison. The GBIF records also do not confirm continuous occupancy across every intervening decade. Gaps in collection effort could create the appearance of persistence even if the population fluctuated. Still, the combination of historical specimens and the massive 2023 count points to a long-running ecological story rather than a recent colonization.
Why a cemetery?
Cemeteries are, almost by accident, ideal habitat for ground-nesting bees. Unlike parks that undergo regular regrading, irrigation changes, or construction, burial grounds tend to leave soil undisturbed for decades. Grass is mowed but the earth beneath it stays put. For a species like Andrena regularis, which depends on stable, compacted soil to build tunnel networks, that kind of consistency is rare in urban and suburban landscapes.
Cornell’s communication materials have emphasized the broader lesson: small, overlooked habitats like cemeteries, roadside verges, and utility corridors can quietly support native bee populations that would struggle in more intensively managed spaces. East Lawn gives that argument a striking numerical anchor.
The researchers also incorporated daily temperature data from the Ithaca Cornell University weather station (NOAA station GHCND:USC00304174) to study what triggers the bees to emerge each spring. By correlating warmer days with peak emergence activity, the study offers early clues about how shifting climate patterns could alter the bees’ life cycle timing and potentially disrupt their synchronization with the flowering plants they depend on for food.
What we still do not know
The 2023 field season provides a snapshot, not a trend. No follow-up trapping data from 2024 or 2025 has been reported, so it remains unclear whether the population has held steady, grown, or declined. Climate variability, changes in cemetery maintenance, pesticide use in the surrounding neighborhood, or disease could all shift numbers from year to year.
Direct statements from the lead researchers have so far appeared only through Cornell’s institutional summary, not through independent interviews or press briefings. No public response from East Lawn Cemetery’s management has been documented regarding awareness of the bee population, any protective measures in place, or future plans for the grounds. Without those perspectives, it is difficult to gauge how secure the habitat will be if landscaping changes, new burial practices, or infrastructure work are proposed.
Andrena regularis is not currently listed as a species of conservation concern at the federal level, but native solitary bees as a group face mounting pressure from habitat loss, pesticide exposure, and climate change. Unlike honeybees, which are managed livestock, wild solitary bees receive little monitoring and almost no legal protection. They are, however, important pollinators of spring-blooming wildflowers and fruit trees, making their health relevant well beyond cemetery fences.
What the discovery signals for urban conservation
For city planners and conservation practitioners, the precise population number at East Lawn matters less than the broader pattern it reveals. Millions of bees were living beneath a space managed entirely for human remembrance, not wildlife, and no one had quantified them until a team of entomologists set out traps. The finding suggests that similar aggregations could exist undetected in cemeteries, old churchyards, and other low-disturbance parcels across the Northeast and beyond.
Protecting those spaces does not necessarily require dramatic intervention. It may be as simple as avoiding soil disturbance during nesting season, limiting pesticide applications, and investing in the kind of long-term monitoring that can distinguish a one-year snapshot from a genuine population trend. For a group of pollinators that rarely draws public attention but quietly sustains the ecosystems around them, even modest protections could make a significant difference.
More from Morning Overview
*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
